The Right to Bear Drones

To the innocent eye, it would seem that America has finally entered a period of reflection and reappraisal regarding the pre-emptive execution of those it identifies as its enemies. For nearly the entirety of President Obama's first term, his program of "lethal operations", "direct action" or "targeted killing" went unmentioned, unacknowledged, unimpeded and unquestioned; the last two weeks alone have brought us the release of the DOJ "white paper", the John Brennan confirmation hearing, the "drone court" discussion in Congress, the President's State of Union promise of "even greater transparency" in our "targeting" of terrorists, and, most importantly, Senator Rand Paul's vow to hold up the confirmation of John Brennan as Director of the CIA unless Brennan answers questions that nobody, till now, has dared ask him.

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What's particularly noteworthy is that Americans seem to have finally grown wary of giving the President of the United States the power to act as judge, jury and executioner at the same time as they have grown weary of giving desperate and sometimes deranged men the power -- in the form of arms and ammunition -- to kill large groups of people in a very short amount of time. The debate over drones is taking place at the same time as the debate on guns, and to the innocent eye it would seem that Americans finally want the killings to stop.

But do they really? And, even if they do, do they really expect the killings to stop? After all, even those who call for new regulations on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines don't want to challenge America's expansive notion of Second Amendment sanctity; and even those who call for a "drone court" to approve the "targeting" of American citizens don't want the targeting of non-citizens to stop or even slow down. Wayne LaPierre may be at war with the Obama Administration, but LaPierre's rhetoric on guns and the Obama Administration's rhetoric on drones are both grounded in a pervasive sense of existential threat that justifies a status quo stained with the occasional bloodshed of innocents -- that makes us both afraid of the weapons in question and more afraid still of a world without them. Indeed, what's startling about drones is how closely they have come to resemble guns in the eyes of their supporters...even though they often find their supporters on opposite sides of the political divide.

Like guns, drones are a lethal technology that has become conflated with a right -- the right of self-defense.

Like guns, drones are designed to kill people, but many of their advocates defend them as inherently moral because they allow good people to defend themselves from bad people. Members of the Obama Administration even go so far as to defend the morality of drones by defending their own morality -- by claiming their obligation, as moral men, to exercise the "ultimate power" over immoral ones.

Like the arguments for the legality and morality of guns, arguments for the legality and morality of drones are almost always framed in the abstract, or on a case by case basis. People in favor of drones speak in terms of their precision and accuracy, or in terms of the specific well-known terrorists killed by them. They rarely say that they've killed thousands of people.

Even when drone proponents acknowledge the brutality of what drones do they are quick to say that they are better than any of the alternatives -- and that the world would be a much more brutal place without them.

One of the leading arguments for the existence of drones is the fact that they already exist -- the fait accompli, the horse out of the barn. As with guns, the question of proliferation can only be answered with further proliferation.

Because drones generally don't kill en masse -- because they are said to punish enemies rather than enemy populations -- they are not associated with arguments against their use, like nuclear weapons. Rather, they are associated with arguments for their use, often in novel situations not limited to war.

Drones don't kill people; disposition matrices kill people.

And so if you want to know how the current debate on drones is going to end up, take a look at how all the debates on guns have ended up, over the last 30 years or so. Consider drones not as a novel technology but as a sophisticated version of a technology that has defined our past and our present -- a technology with a precedent.

Consider them not as an expensive way of killing people but as a potentially cheap one; not as a recondite technology but as a technology soon readily available; not as a technology that favors the powerful but rather as a technology that will one day serve to empower everyone from rogue states to non-state actors.